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The Most Annoying Advert of All Time?

Two of the things we bang on about at Cirkle when it comes to marketing are creativity and memorability. It goes something like: if your PR, advertising and marketing aren’t creative, then they won’t be memorable. We applaud those companies who are prepared to be a little brave when it comes to their promotions and who are prepared to stand out from the crowd.

But there are instances where a campaign can be extremely memorable despite lacking any kind of clever creativity. And it’s one of these that is causing me somewhat of a quandary at present. It’s not far off the truth to say that the recent ad for the website WeBuyAnyCar.com is driving me totally bonkers (no pun intended). Watch it for yourself…

This is the epitome of everything I hate about advertising, appealing as it does to the lowest common denominator. It has graphics that look like they were designed by my five week old daughter. And someone somewhere sat down, listened to the company saying ‘we want our new ad to promote our URL’ and came up with the bright idea of repeating it about 500 times in 30 seconds. It has a soundtrack that is guaranteed to get in your head and drive you nuts, and therein lies my dilemma…

As an advert, very annoyingly, it’s extremely memorable. It works. You can’t help but have the web address WeBuyAnyCar.com in your head after you’ve seen it. It does what the Crazy Frog did for ringtones a few years back, and I don’t necessarily mean drive a nation mad. That’s just a side effect.

So where do you sit on this? Do you give kudos to WeBuyAnyCar.com for producing an ad that, despite its extreme annoyance factor, works? Or do you, like me as a marketeter, totally resent them for producing such an awful but undoubtedly successful ad and think twice about your entire career choice?!